Woodworking blog entries tagged with 'branches'

The other day I was driving home and noticed a neighbor had cut back a tree and had some limbs at the curb. I see this fairy often and very rarely stop to grab anything in it’s raw state. I have a very limited space and have no means to resaw limbs into planks/boards.
For some strange reason I stopped immediately, that tree looks different, I thought to myself, It didn’tLook like the other trees in my area… Hmmm
I loaded up as much as I could fit into the back and head...

I went to art school, and this kind of work was the domain of the “fine artists,” who make abstract art to express ideas without getting literal about it. I.e. maybe they were inspired by an apple, but there may be no actual representation of an apple anywhere in the piece, and the point was for you to find your own interpretation, which probably wouldn’t contain an apple.
Much of the time, we in the computer animation major, and even those in more closely related majors,...

In part 2 of this saga, I got a call from Camille who’s lawn was coated in freshly fallen, fungally rotten Jacaranda mimosifolia. Her call awoke me with a start this morning, and soon I was at her house, borrowing her electricity for my electric chainsaw, and cutting up what I could. One heat stroke, or heat exhaustion later, and I drove away with a truck full of limbs. I ran home for my second shower and change, then off to work, then ran home at lunch (nice living 1.5 miles away) to d...

In yesterday's dramatic episode, Camille – the homeowner who’s Jacaranda mimosifolia street tree fell over due to fungal rot at the base – was very concerned about a whole host of things that might happen if she allowed me to cut up the tree and take a bunch with me. She was rather justified about some of it, perhaps much of it, but that didn’t help eager me, of course.
This morning, after waiting a whole day for the street crew to come by as promised, she’d h...

22 days ago I posted about the decimation of my Hollywood Junipers (Juniperus chinensis). My plan was to go through and ‘limb’ them, or at this scale, to ‘twig’ them. Little by little, I’ve been going out there for 15 minutes or so at a time, sawing each little twig off with a stroke of the Irwin carpenter’s saw, then scrubbing the sap off my hands. What a giant pain, but I admit it was fun. I love the feel and sound of the saw, the smell of the junipers, g...

Wow, it’s been a busy month. These are from a month and 2 days ago. My landlady stopped by to check things out, and decided the Hollywood Junipers (Juniperus chinensis) needed trimming. Here’s how they looked, during a day when I was drying out my tarp, and realizing it was the same size as my tiny back yard:
That was 3 months before they were trimmed. They had grown in a lot more in that time. I had cut down a limb last year so I’d have room for a wood storage shed, ...

A couple weeks ago I passed some tree trimmers cutting up a handful of paperbark trees (Melaleuca quinquenervia).
I passed a few times on lunchtime errands, and finally decided to stop and ask for some free wood. I’ve been so curious for 5 years now about what’s underneath the spongy, peeling bark of these trees. You can punch the trunks and leave a deep imprint of your hand, which swells back up eventually, hiding the dent. It doesn’t hurt, because they feel like a s...

I decided to update my old toy version of my ‘00 Ford Focus hatchback to more accurately reflect the typical look of its big brother these days. I’ve made a couple of trips for Eucalyptus that have looked very much like this, complete with long branches sticking out the window :)
Big version:

You folks helped me to ID this as probably a California Bay Laurel, blown down a pretty strong wind storm a week ago. I’m still going to research it, but for now, it needed to be sealed up against the checking that had already begun. I wanted some good pics of the cross sections before they get their coat of sealer. I have 2 gallons of Anchorseal in shipment now from the source, and I’m wondering if I should have gotten the 5gal bucket. Meanwhile, last week I picked up 2 quarts of...

It would seem Rob (user: socalwood) nailed another species down for me in my previous post – the Pride of Madeira – going off nothing more than one gnarled limb (which turned out to be the whole trunk and some branches of a small plant) and some withering leaves. Great job, Rob!
I looked a bit more into one of the few branches of the second mystery species, and found a yellowy, eccentrically-ringed wood that seems to love to split along its length down its ring and ray lines. I...